Johnny Terrell, Adams 12 director of student engagement, knocks on a student’s door during a home visit along with Nalleli Valverde, Adams 12 community liaison, and Martin McCarthy, STEM Launch assistant principal, on September 22, 2015. (Anya Semenoff, The Denver Post)

This week’s education news focused on some intervention highlights, an update on the sponsorship of a Denver ballot measure, and employment woes at schools that could mean job opportunities for some. Catch up on this week’s Take Note…

Interventions: The Cherry Creek school district was one of the state’s top ten last year according to data analyzed by the Colorado Department of Education when it came to educating English learners. This year, the district is finishing its rollout of their model for teaching English learners which involves keeping them in mainstream classrooms, and supporting teachers by pairing them with specialists.Read more…

Comments Off on Take note: a look back at the week of education news, Vol. 35

Lots of media were searching for such stock photos this week (Lewis Geyer/Longmont Times-Call).

A she-said, they-said over a lunch lady’s provocative claims, a flurry of reports and legal developments on everything from innovation schools to school finance and college remediation rates, a bold undertaking by a Portland newspaper and more highlight this week’s Take Note …

Kids at Ashley Elementary School took part in an all school rally to cheer on the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders who were about to take their first PARCC tests (Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post).

In this week’s education news roundup, a closer look at how Common Core has changed classrooms and schools, a cowboy church causes ripples in a southern Colorado school district, a school silences a valedictorian who wanted to use his graduation speech to come out as gay, an examination of the latest teacher turnover numbers and college officials defend trips to Asia that have yet to bear much fruit …

This was a busy week again in education with most school districts now in full testing mode, the state Board of Education meeting to discuss parental rights and testing scores, a small school district suing the state and legislators debating a program to fund teacher bonuses.

Carla Farris talks with other parents and some educators about opting her daughter out of standardized testing. The group met last month in Highlands Ranch. (AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post).

Lots going on in education this week. Did you hear that new state assessments of some sort debuted in Colorado? We may have written a word or two about it.

The week also featured a complicating wrinkle to a bipartisan student data privacy bill at the Statehouse, a forum on student protest movements, a voucher ruling in The South and more. On to this week’s Take Note …

On Monday, more than 13,000 DPS students at 53 schools began taking Colorado Measures of Academic Success, or CMAS, assessments, and on Tuesday that number rose to more than 36,000 students at 153 DPS district-run and charter schools.

Some schools have reported issues, ranging from quick fixes, such as a classroom being unable to login to the assessments due to an incorrect URL and passcode, to an issue caused by a district-level proctor cache setting; however, as of now, the vast majority of tests have gone smoothly. The proctor cache issue affected some workstations in 25 district-run schools on Monday. It was resolved by noon that same day and did not reoccur on Tuesday. The error prevented certain student workstations from connecting to our proctor cache setup in order to download the test form content. These schools rescheduled the affected assessments for Monday afternoon or Tuesday.

Additionally, DPS is working with Pearson, the vendor contracted to create and administer the CMAS Reading and Math assessment platform, to address platform issues that have reportedly affected small numbers of students.

The DPS Department of Technology Services (DoTS) and Department of Assessment, Research and Evaluation are assisting schools via a reporting hotline, and are working as quickly as possible to troubleshoot and correct any issues – large or small — that arise with this new assessment platform.

UPDATE: 6 p.m., Monday, March 9: Cherry Creek School District officials said technological glitches in PARCC testing Monday have been resolved, and all students were able to complete the tests.

District spokeswoman Tustin Amole said the district worked with state education department officials and testing vendor Pearson to resolve the problem (see below). She said the precise issue has not been pinpointed but may have involved too many people on the system at once.

Amole also provided a first look at data on the number of district students who have opted out or refused PARCC testing, at least at the high school level (ninth, 10th and 11th grade):

The occasion: the Joint Education Committee getting its hands on a much-anticipated report from an advisory task force that urged reducing the testing burden without forsaking holding schools and districts accountable for student achievement.

Why the yawning gap in the estimated time given over to testing? Are either numbers right? What exactly is being measured?

For parents wondering how their kids’ schools stack up, a coalition of nonprofit groups Monday released its fourth annual report card using easy-to-grasp letter grades their children know all too well.

The online tool, Colorado School Grades, relies on academic growth and proficiency data from the Colorado Department of Education and uses a formula developed with the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.

Some quick takeaways: Top-ranked schools are scattered throughout the state, strong elementary school options abound in the Denver metro area, the Colorado Springs region has high school down, and the overwhelming majority of top-performing schools have something distinguishing them, either as a charter school, K-8 school, innovation status or some other special trait.

Pull up next to public transit buses in cities nationwide and an advertising board featuring a service by a local business is a sight often seen.

And now, Aurora Public School buses are next, as the district Tuesday announced its set to outfit yellow buses with boards that advertise for select organizations willing to pay up.

According to a news release, the cost for a bus board ad starts as low as $250 per month, and half of the revenue goes toward the school district while the remaining goes toward a local company who is designing the ads.

“This is a wonderful opportunity, we were happy to explore new avenues to create revenue for the district during these difficult economic times,” said Paula Hans, a spokeswoman for APS.

Hans adds that the district has had to cut $70 million from its budget in the last three years. Both the Cherry Creek and Douglas County School Districts do similar bus advertising.

The district, according to the release, has developed guidelines to ensure that bus ads are appropriate for children and families. All ads are approved by the district prior to production.

Some of the early advertisers involved in the effort include TCF Bank, Change and Pickens Technical College and Aurora Schools Federal Credit Union.

Colorado Classroom provides ground-level reporting on what’s going on in the state’s public schools and on college campuses, looking at people, places, issues, trends and innovative approaches to education.